Sep 042016
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Sep 032016
Several days ago word hit of someone with six file boxes of their fathers stuff, wondering what to do with it. Not an unusual occurrence. But in this case, the father was an important engineer at North American Aviation, worked on the XB-70, B-1 and Shuttle, and the files all related to that. In the end, the archive wound up on Craigslist, and sold shortly afterwards. It is now being shipped… to me.
I would not have been able to afford the archive – never mind the shipping costs – on my own. However, by working with the patrons on the APR Patreon , we were able to pool funds so that the total cost per person is *trivial.* When the archive gets here – all 300+ pounds of it – I will go through every single page and catalog it; the best stuff will be scanned and, barring ITAR & classification issues, all of the crowdfunders will receive the complete set of high-rez scans. And then when I’ve gleaned from it what’s worth gleaning, it will be donated to an appropriate archive… the Smithsonian, the SDASM, the National Archives, Edwards AFB, whatever seems best in the end.
The door to sign up for this crowdfunding project is now closed. It followed shortly on the heels of a similar project that scored an admittedly much smaller but definitely fascinating collection of F2Y Sea Dart documentation and diagrams, including much about operational follow-on attack aircraft meant to operate from ships and subs; and a similar archive that was crowdfunded a year or two back that scored a whole bunch of 2707 SST stuff. I’ve grown sick of seeing amazing stuff appear on ebay and then vanish into a black hole, never to be seen by anyone again; this way, aerospace history is preserved and shared.
If you’d like to be involved in this sort of thing, sign up for the APR Patreon and you’ll not only get the monthly aerospace goodies that comes with membership, but you’ll also be able to get in on these crowd funding efforts. You’ll save aerospace history, get a bunch of amazing stuff, and not have to spend a whole lot to do it.
Sep 032016
I honestly don’t know if they’re offering an actual product or not. I’m pretty sure not.
I think the fact that I can’t understand a word of it really helps to sell it.
Might be mildly NSFW, so it’s after the break.
Sep 032016
And from the looks of it, someday soon.
Drone footage showing the flood of people dying to get into the “Ark Encounter” five minutes before opening on August 28, 2016.
So what will the reworked casino/hotel version be called? “Trump Titanic II” seems obvious. TrumpTanic? Looking at the shape of the “Ark” I’d recommend making it into an Exxon Valdez tribute. Slight reworking of the island at the rear and a new coat of paint and you’re good to go.
That is one *hell* of a parking lot. The amount of carbon dumped into the air during the process of chopping down the forest, grading the terrain and laying down the asphalt, coupled with the solar radiation that will be absorbed by the blacktop and converted into straight-up heat… that parking lot alone will be responsible for the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the flooding of Florida.
Sep 032016
Because why not, here are some panoramas I’ve stitched together from some photos I’ve taken recently showing the skies around here…
More after the break.
Sep 022016
For a long time many people thought that life on Earth was less than 10,000 years old. With discoveries in the 19th century, that got pushed back to tens of millions. Then hundreds of millions. Then a billion or more years. Guess what:
Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures
Fossils of 4 centimeter stromatolites (mats of “biofilm,” or cyanobacterial scum) have been found in the Isua supracrustal belt in southwest Greenland dating to 3.7 billion years ago. This is 220 million years older then the previous record holder from Australia. This pushes the estimate of the beginning of single cell life back to more than 4 billion years ago, during the Hadean period. This is backed up by discoveries in late 2015 of traces of carbon in 4.1 billion year old zircon crystals that hint at a biological origin. Given that the Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, this is a remarkably short period for life to arise, and in one hell of an environment (Get it? See what I did there? “Hell” of an environment? “Hadean” period? Huh? Bah.)
Life, it seems, arises quickly in terrible places. Fossils may well exist on Mars, and possibly on Venus. Complex multicellular life, however, seems to take a bit more effort. Life on Earth peaked with bacteria for around three and a half billion years. The universe may be filled with planets coated in scum, with only a few advanced up to worms and bugs.
Sep 012016
This is a vision of the cosmos made The Old Fashioned Way… analog, not digital. A lot of the visuals don;t seem terribly accurate, but they sure are pretty. And they’d fit in quite well at the end of “2001,” which makes it worth the few minutes right there.
Sep 012016
Ooops.
‘Alien’ Signal Had Earthly Cause, Russian Scientists Say
Well, that’s a bummer. Not a real shocker, but nevertheless a bummer.
Sep 012016
UPDATED: See more at the end.
Sure, “crazy” and “stupid” are obvious. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “vapid.” There’s something about the woman’s voice here that I find to be *really* grating. Not just the insane worldview on display, but just the voice itself, the speaking style that seems… I dunno. Like, omigawd, old-school Valley Girl but with a dash of stoner thrown in, so that her *voice* sound… what? Lazy? How to describe it?
Take a look at the video after the break and despair.
Sep 012016
Well, this ain’t good. During propellant loading operations, an explosion occurred at the Falcon 9 launch pad, destroying the rocket and the Amos 6 communications satellite.
Details are fuzzy, but some reports suggest that it was the hydrazine propellant for the *satellite* that was the cause of the explosion rather than the Falcon 9 itself.
Explosion at SpaceX launch pad destroys rocket, satellite
So far, very little to go on. All the videos I’ve seen start well after the explosion; not too many people were filming the rocket at the time, as nothing was scheduled to happen right about then. I’m sure more will come out later. The engineer in me say “probably just one of them things, sometimes mistakes are made or mechanisms fail,” but the more paranoid part of me wonders about:
- It was an Israeli satellite. There are people who don’t like the Israelis.
- SpaceX’s recent successes have irritated some big-money competitors, who have had to crank out new designs of their own in order to compete. They won’t be saddened to see SpaceX take a hit.
So, which would be worse? Bog-standard engineering/operations failure… or sabotage?
UPDATE: Video of the explosion itself:
Time between visible explosion and audible is about 12 seconds, so the camera is probably about 2.5 miles away.
Here are some craptacular screenshots from the above video:
Note that the explosion seems to originate from just below the payload fairing…
The explosion starts up top, and you can see it march down through the booster, bursting the tanks.
A few seconds in, you can see the payload fairing drop. By this point the booster itself is long gone; it seem like the fairing was actually being supported by the tower. Note that the top of the tower is now bent over.
Since the explosion originated below the payload shroud, my guess is that the *payload* didn’t initially explode. Looks like either the upper stage or the feed lines leading into the payload. In either event, it’s damned odd to have an explosion at the point in the process. A static discharge event? A hydrazine leak onto something catalytic?